PP: "Design and Access Statement"- is this OK? (longish, sorry!)

[Tansie]

Design and Access Statement: xxxx address
Project:
Single integral garage conversion to 2/3 living room and 1/3 garage ?store?, retaining up and over door, plus addition of a window to the newly created living room.

We wish to convert our existing integral single garage to create an additional living room for our growing family, but we will be retaining about a 1/3 of the existing space to provide space for ?garage? style storage, mainly of bikes and tools. This will retain the existing up and over garage door thus the elevation and appearance of the front of the property, facing the road, will not be altered in any way. The new living room will be accessed via the existing internal door into the existing garage.

A ?solid? wall will divide the two rooms, internally.
We wish to install a small window on the left external side of the property to provide light for the new living room.

This will be 1200mm wide and 1300 high and will match all the other existing windows in the property in style (white double glazed PVC). One half of this window will open. It will be set at the same height as the other living room window (in the front of the house), i.e its cill will be 90mm above ground level. It will face a 6 foot high wooden fence (across a paved back-garden access footpath). The neighbouring property is a mirror image of ours so this new window will face its side blank wall across its back-garden access path (further along, both properties have a single door on this side which face each other. They access the utility rooms of both houses. The 6 foot high fence separates both properties the whole depth of the houses and back gardens.).

The top 200mm of this window might just about be visible from the front of the house (from the public road) although it will be largely obscured by the 6 foot high garden gate beside the garage up and over door.

This alteration will not affect any of the surrounding area; either in terms of flood risk or incursion on the SINC across the main road (as detailed in the supplied Biodiversity statement.)

The property retains 2 large off-road car parking spaces to the front of it.

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What do you think, those who've been there? Does this cover it? I'm applying via Householder PP and yes, I do need a D&A statement!

Why do you need a D&A statement? If its because you are in a conservation area you need to put a bit extra in on my the character and appearance of the cons area won't be harmed. (just as an example!)

Other stuff seems ok but I was always fairly relaxed about these statements for small jobs when I worked at a council!

I don't know why I do but apparently I do, according the the Council's compulsory check list!

Thanks for looking over it.

glad to see it's now going smoothly!

Do you really mean 90mm cill height? Or 900mm?

Apart from that it looks like you have explained it all pretty well.
Maybe add a bit to cover more on access - ie no change to front/rear entrances and no net effect on accessibility/disabled.

Good luck

Thanks! Missed that typo! Correcting it right now, and have added the access statement stuff.

Argh. Just posted that post tho' I wrote it at 8 am today, and now it's 6pm!

Since then we've had a setback- they're put it 'on hold' because I used the same OS map that was used in submitting PP plans for this property 3 years ago (which we never acted on) and that breaches copyright- or rather, breaches their desire to make another £18 out of me, maybe?

If you paid to use it previously my undetstanding is that you can then use it again. If they get sticky trace over it on baking parchment and scan it in. Bloody bureacracy gone mad!!!!

I did clean it up from its previous use- mainly because it had PLANNING PORTAL in bold right across our property, entirely obscuring its boundaries.....!!

I guess it's a modern trend- the 'understanding' that to have certain things happen, they know you need for other things to happen; like booking, say, an air ticket. To 'make that happen', you need to pay for it. To pay for it you have to use a card. To use that card, you have to pay a fee to do so- here it is, pay up or no flight.

No, you don't need an ID card in this country! Of course not, we're a free country! But you try taking out a membership for a DVD club, say, without an approved form of ID...

I need PP. For that to happen I have to submit approved plans ( which is why the Planning Portal have 4 providers to 'choose' from. Who would you like to fleece you? No, sorry, here's us being oh-so-helpful in providing links to 4 'partners' to assist you (but we won't accept your PP application without you paying one of them out first...'))

Is this new then? I didnt buy my plan 2 years ago. But once you have bought the right to use it i think you get to use it for a similar thing. Sounds very odd.

Sorry, have to . i dont disagree with you, but we are half way through an extension, and I think it's likely you will come across worse obstacles than an extra £18 for some paperwork. Save your blood pressure tablets for later

From teh Council: "The site location plan submitted is a photocopy of an OS plan which breaches the copyright and is not acceptable for planning purposes. In addition it is not to an accurate scale as required by the application checklist. Please submit a site location plan to a scale of 1:1250 or 1:2500 with the application site outlined in red. "

Yet funnily enough it was the one they accepted to grant PP for an extension on this house 4 years ago (which expired without being acted upon), complete with the scale, giving 0.1km on it....

I was sort of wondering why one of the government's guidance brochures you can trawl through the Planning Portal to locate more or less said 'Since the relaxation of planning law it has been noted that many councils are rejecting planning applications for spurious reasons.... and this must stop'. Now I know exactly what they mean. This map is to show where my house it. It clearly and unambiguously shows where my house is (though, interestingly, I had to clean the map up of various stamps, including a thick black text, right across it, that obscures our boundary, saying 'Planning Portal')...

I am inordinately cross about this, actually. I understood planning law was to stop people building housing estates in National Parks etc, not to prevent householders putting a wall across a garage and turning it into 2 rooms.

Is it not covered under permitted development? (ignorant in these matters...)

Nope, all permitted development rights removed on this estate! Which is why they have 'got us'.

If it is an unlicensed photocopy then they may have a point.
However if you previously paid for the plan to use for PP at the same house with the same council, then I would be very surprised if you cannot reuse it for a second planning permission.

However they cannot refuse a tracing of the exact same plan as long as it is to scale! Although it sounds like they want a colour copy rather so that it is a red, rather than a black, line around the boundary.

Your experience is reminding me of the 2 hideous applications I did for DH's work. First was the shop front. Designed to all good high street guidance - unlike the crap solid roller shutters on all the other properties banged up without permission against all good guidance. 12 weeks and 1 failed application later, they finally did their "essential site visit" and revealed the extra form that they wanted us to fill in but hadn't previously requested as they wanted 2 applications to cover the one piece of work. Permission came through after about a 4 month total wait.

Second was taking down a rubbish/hacked about painted wall with brick and block sections in it, and replacing it with a London stock brick fair faced wall which was 3 courses higher. More bureacracy and delay - including their request for us to submit a stock brick sample (who doesn't know what a reclaimed stock looks like??) at a cost to us of £87 to cover their admin separate to the fee on the main application. All this because we applied for permission when virtually no one else in our borough bothers. Whole blocks of flats go up without planning or building regs around here and the dodgy developers go unchallenged. Meanwhile the little person who wants to do the right thing gets it in the neck. I totally understand how much red mist you must be seeing at this point. OK I better stop because I am ranting now.

I would send them the tracing. Drawings do not have to be computer generated. They will have to accept it (as long as to scale; with a red boundary line and a proper title block with address, date, your name, scale and application reference) but they probably will not like it!

Whilst I've been out today, DH drove over to the Council offices again today and PAID £18 to get THEIR OS map thing. I was all up for fighting it- but I am waiting to hear from them when they complain that the map, being precisely the same one as we submitted, obscures our site with the words PLANNING PORTAL, thus is unacceptable.

TBH, last night, for the first time, I thought mm- who'd ever know or care if we do do it without PP? You can so see why people don't bother!